ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP IN YOUR DATA CENTRE DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN

I came across this article about the importance of having a good back up contingency in your Data Center Disaster Recovery Plan

That phrase has been a cornerstone of good engineering practice since the earliest days of broadcasting. In the digital era, where information such as client lists, commercials and music libraries can be worth more than the hardware it runs on, backing up data should be an important part of every station’s routine.

Basic concepts

Current storage technology for the music, commercial and log data in automation systems is based on hard drives.

As mechanical devices with moving parts, they are the most likely failure point in the system. Manufacturers quote a Mean Time Between Failures of over 1 million hours, or greater than 100 years. More frequent failures occur due to infant mortality and environmental conditions such as heat and vibration being exceeded during shipping or in the field.

In addition to bad sectors on a hard drive disk, the data on drives may also be corrupted by software glitches or computer viruses. The challenge for broadcasters is to make sound decisions regarding the tradeoff between performance vs. fault tolerance.

Tape backups have long been used to preserve data. Backup software is used to stream data from the hard disk onto some sort of tape cartridge, which is removable. The transfer rate of data is very slow when compared to hard drive speeds, and backing up takes considerable time. These backups represent a snapshot of data at a given time, and are always somewhat out of date.

Since tapes store the data in a linear fashion, recovering a particular file which has been corrupted or lost can be time-consuming. Despite some of the drawbacks, tape systems have been a convenient way to recover from catastrophic failure.

A more elegant system of backing up files involves disc mirroring or Redundant Array Inexpensive Drive systems. RAID systems have a multi-channel controller and three or more drives. Other systems provide full or partial backup of files on different machines throughout the station.

Storage, small, medium, large

Storage systems need not be complex or expensive, especially at the small-market level.

Jim Trapani, owner of JT Communications, notes that stations on a tight budget may wish to prioritize and backup only commercials and other locally-produced materials. “Music libraries are more generic, and can be easily replaced. Not so with local spots.”

To read the rest of this interesting article CLICK HERE

Click Here to get a FREE trial version of Genie Backup Manager now! Set up your data center disaster recovery plan today!